Gone Girl and When Good Movies Happen to Bad People

[Charles Phipps]

To be fair, I don't see the possibility of "fake allegations of abuse and worse" going up because Gone Girl exists as a premise. Those already exist and are usually wrong. Much like someone fingering someone for stabbing them Yes, it's possible they're lying and there have been cases where it's proven to be a lie but I tend to assume they're not unless evidence is presented why.

The fact misogynists or simply grossly ignorant people about women will be able to say. "She's just like Amy" is perhaps an unfortunate result of this movie. Though I think this movie has a more feminist slant than the reverse. Amy is not a monster because she's a woman.

Amy is a monster because people have treated her being a woman as an excuse to shit on her for her entire life.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

As much as I agree with you on how complex this movie is awesomely complex in how terrible and morally grey its characters are, I have to take issue with the entire idea that people are enjoying something the "wrong" way.

The beauty of art and entertainment is the varied ways that it can be enjoyed.

I know the people you're talking about, as hyperbolic and over the top as you describe them, aren't very likeable, but they have just as much right to enjoy the movie their way.
Now I'd like to mention that I don't really believe these fans exist or will exist, at least in the way you describe, but the Fight Club people absolutely are real, so I'll argue their case. The case that there is no "right" way to enjoy things.

My favorite example is the Starship Troopers movie. On the one hand, it's a satire of the military and whatnot. But on the other, it can be watched and enjoyed purely as a Humanity Fuck Yeah, come get some action movie. It doesn't have to be enjoyed either way regardless of what anyone from the writer of the book to the director of the movie might say.

Warhammer 40k is another good example in that there are several camps of people and none of them are more correct than any others. Some people enjoy it like Starship Troopers, as comedy and satire. On the other hand, there are plenty of people, like me, that find it more enjoyable as a super grimdark tale of depression and apocalyptic warfare.

Enjoying something in the way you want to is great. Just don't try to tell other people how they are supposed to enjoy it.

 

[maxben]

You do it wrong, Bob. A critic is to critique movies, not moviegoers. He calls films hideous, not people. And he clearly doesn't do the "You're dumb, I'm smart" thing all the time. If he does, he will rightfully lose his audience.

You can tell me when he loses his audience, since he has ALWAYS been vocal on his views and how he perceives the world. He has never hidden it and some follow his work because they find his perspective important (in general, not always). His audience knows who he is. And I strongly disagree, art critics should criticize society as it relates to the art. The job of such a critic is to evaluate the culture that births and consumes the art, because the culture is the necessary beginning and end point of the art itself. To make an artificial separation is to remove all meaning from the art and the process of critiquing.

 

[Netrigan]

Since I've directed my Reaction Politics rant at GamerGate folks more than a few times, I'll throw it at MovieBob here.

The big problem with this particular article is it's not about the movie. It's not even really about the group of people he doesn't like. It's about his fears about how they might hypothetically react to this particular movie.

In other words, it's bullshit. Completely uninformative bullshit, because he's decided to preemptively react to an opinion that currently doesn't exist.

And this comes at the expense of telling us about what he thinks the movie is saying about gender politics. He could have put a little tag at the end expressing his fear that people will treat this as the modern-day Fatal Attraction where Evil Women are the things which keep happening to men, who are the real victims of sexist oppression. Whatever.

About the only use I have for the article was to find a place to discuss the movie without having to worry about Spoiler Tags, since this movie isn't a major topic of conversation at any of my usual Geek Haunts. Otherwise, it's meaningless twaddle about what might happen... maybe... if the sort of people who are into that sort of brain-dead interpretation of the movie are the kinds of people who will flock to this movie. Fight Club kind of had that vibe. It operated on the cerebral and the brain-dead; it was a movie asking to be misunderstood by a large chunk of its audience.

This one, not so sure about.

 

[Szabolcs Fekete]

I'm sorry but it seems like you really don't get Fight Club either. If anything, it's about trying to find your identity in the modern world (90s), when the traditional male archetype lost its necessity and meaning.

It's about growth. The narrator is stuck as a manchild, and he imagines himself as a "cool, manly teenager" (Tyler really does act like one) who will lead him on the way of character development. And to truly become adult ("a man"), he ultimately needs to reject "the teenager", who is destructive and just a really shit person. By the end, he doesn't need Tyler anymore, he outgrew him.

It's definitely much more than "oh, make-believe-manly-clubs turn you into a fascit or terrorist".

 

[MaddKossack115]

My reactions to reading this article

(Bob talks about how "Fight Club's" message of 'people advocating resistance to placid commercialization jump the gun to being anarchist neo-Nazis' is adopted by wannabe tough guys wanting to establish fight clubs of their own)

Me: "Well, Fight Club does raise good points of how the vapidity of consumerist America did drive these guys to such extremes, and how some fans can easily interpret it so that they should become more independent of the system without going to full-scale terrorist attacks. So I take it the 'misaimed fandom' of Gone Girl is going to be about women who find Amy a violent anti-hero against the male establishment even though she's basically a serial killer, right?"

(Bob talks about how "Gone Girl's" message of 'a women exploits perception of 'guy killing girl' to frame her husband for her 'murder' is probably going to be adopted by rabid anti-feminists who want to claim any feminist is as much a psycho as Amy)

Me: " ...Okay, that might be a real problem."

That said, not even the most extreme misinterpretations of David Fincher movies can hold a candle to how badly people miss the point of "Downfall", which is actually supported by neo-Nazis for 'humanizing' Hitler - even though the story was about how Berlin was about to be destroyed when the Soviets rolled into town, it had nothing but contempt for Hitler and most of his subordinates, with Hitler being a deluded madman who didn't realize his idiocy led his Reich to be obliterated in the first place, and was willing for all of Germany to be destroyed if his plans of conquest had failed. As Roger Ebert puts it to those who 'admired' Hitler's portrayal in the movie "Admiration I did not feel. Sympathy I felt in the sense that I would feel it for a rabid dog, while accepting that it must be destroyed... As we regard this broken and pathetic Hitler, we realize that he did not alone create the Third Reich... He was skilled in the ways he exploited that feeling, and surrounded himself by gifted strategists and propagandists, but he was not a great man, simply one armed by fate to unleash unimaginable evil."